Deeplinks Posts by Kurt

Unfortunately, it appears that the lure of bulk surveillance is not just a temptation for the federal government. Last summer, about a month after new leaks exposed the NSA’s bulk content PRISM program, Cyrus Vance, Jr., the District Attorney for Manhattan, decided to go secretly fishing through 381...

This statement was updated at 2:35 PM PST 5/7/14.
Earlier today, the House Judiciary Committee passed a revised version of the USA FREEDOM Act. We’re pleased by Congress’ strong step toward ending bulk surveillance of phone records of Americans. This bill is a good start toward reforming an out-of-control surveillance...

Last week, the White House released its report on big data and its privacy implications, the result of a 90-day study commissioned by President Obama during his January 17 speech on NSA surveillance reforms. Now that we’ve had a chance to read the report we’d like to share our...

While most courts in the United States are adversarial—each party presents its side and a jury, or occasionally a judge, makes a decision—in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), only the government presents its case to a judge. While typically two opposing sides work under public review to make sure...

What is a warrant canary? A warrant canary is a colloquial term for a regularly published statement that a service provider has not received legal process that it would be prohibited from saying it had received. Once a service provider does receive legal process, the speech prohibition goes into place...

In an emergency hearing on March 19th, the government tried to convince the Northern District Court of California that the NSA should be relieved of its obligation to preserve evidence of dragnet collection of call records for the EFF's First Unitariancase. The arguments in court revealed...

UPDATE: This page has been moved, and this copy is no longer being updated. For more recent developments, see the latest version of our Encrypt the Web report. We’ve asked the companies in our Who Has Your Back Program what they are doing to bolster encryption in light of...

Today, there are full-page advertisements running in the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, Roll Call, and The Hill. They all have the same message: big tech companies are calling on Congress to rein in the mass surveillance. You can read the full message on the newly-launched Reform Government...

An article yesterday in the Washington Post disclosed the NSA's massive cell phone location program. The program, codenamed CO-TRAVELER, is designed to track who meets with whom and covers everyone who carries a cell phone, all around the world.
With neither public debate nor court authorization, CO-TRAVELER collects billions...

Sitting on the wire, the NSA has the ability to track and make a record of every website you visit. Today, the Huffington Post revealed that the NSA is using this incredible power to track who visits online porn websites, and to use this information to discredit those it...